Meeting The Shakespeare Requirement
Satiric novel digs into the economic realities of university life
Julie Schumacher’s new novel “The Shakespeare Requirement” (Doubleday, 2018) is a satire of academic life in a small (rather pathetic) Midwestern American university. It was passed on to me by a close friend at Trent who had read Schumacher’s previous novel “Dear Committee Members” and had enjoyed both books. He knew I would appreciate not only the depiction of Payne University’s bizarre English department but its dramatization of a university whose very survival depends on attracting whatever fundraising dollars might come its way.
The storyline has many echoes of current operations at our own Trent University where persistent government underfunding has led to many changes in its departmental offerings and overall educational commitments. While publicly funded Canadian universities differ from privately funded American institutions in numerous ways, they share many internal problems that are both worrisome in fact and laughable in the hands of a capable satirist.
Slagging universities in fiction has been a popular subject for decades. Seedy or obsessive professors, insensitive administrators, and struggling or aggressive students have long been fertile ground for enjoyable amusement. I think of Kingsley Amis’s “Lucky Jim,” David Lodge’s “Nice Work” and “Changing Places,” Philip Roth’s “The Human Stain” and Richard Russo’s “Straight Man” as examples of fine satiric comedy. Another Russo academic novel “That Old Cape Magic” is a link here because of its wonderfully nasty disdain for Midwestern institutions of “higher learning.”
Schumacher’s book is bound to sell lots of copies. It is a “good read.” Nothing in it demands much thinking or emotional engagement. Her satiric approach has the overall effect of rendering almost every character ridiculous or pathetic, or both. But there are plenty of laughs to be had as she unveils her roster of daft, often dimwitted university types who carry on with their predictable and irreparable behaviour over the course of the action.
Among the English department members there are 12 tenured professors (all eccentrics) who not only fight among themselves but for the most part do no meritorious academic research on their specialized subjects. Only two have serious academic projects — professor Sandra Atherman (Victorian Literature) is devoted to all things Bronte (she is a model of cult building and superficiality in the academy), and Dennis Cassovan is a detached but serious elder statesman who is committed to teaching Shakespeare’s work and worries that the university might choose to eliminate the Bard from the curriculum. The title of his book, “Anamnesis in Three Roman Plays,” suggests a dogged but well-meaning irrelevance in his own scholarship — “anamnesis,” by the way, means recollection of things past. As is usual in universities these days, much of the teaching at Payne is done by struggling TAs or part-timers who are usually found in unhealthy basement offices and who remain nameless drones.
The central character is Jason T. Fitger, the newly elected chair of Payne’s English department. He’s a novelist whose creative spring has run dry after one early success. He doesn’t want the chair’s job but takes it in the absence of any other willing colleague, only to find himself forced to herd his recalcitrant department colleagues into signing a new university document, the “Statement of Vision” (SOV), that could, indirectly, give the university the power to eliminate parts of the established curricula of various departments. It is “a nebulous document,” as the narrator tells us, “intended to summarize the department’s purpose — as if the teaching of literature and composition were something obscure.” Its key words are “inquiry, professionalization, engagement, and a multiplicity of perspectives in a globalized world” — frightening, newwave terms in themselves.
Every department must sign off on it in order to qualify for funding. In the case of the English department, Cassovan’s fear is that the SOV might be used to eliminate the teaching of Shakespeare to future students. He, of course, refuses to sign off on the SOV.
Fitger also finds his department offices threatened with the takeover of much of its space as a result of the grandiose schemes of Roland Gladwell, the chair of the economics department. Gladwell is the epitome of the ambitious academic who has no use for the university library. University administrators are generally of no help as they are committed to their own (sometimes frightening) political agendas or governed by their personal eccentricities or inadequacies. The provost, for instance, is seldom on campus because of his passion for collecting tarantulas in Suriname.
Jay Fitger is the focus of the novel. Though he is made fun of for his personal and administrative weaknesses, he earns the reader’s empathy for the ways in which he rises above self-interest in helping out some of his colleagues and students in their particular needs. His wife left him earlier for a faculty dean, but she and Fitger carry on a bickering, mutually attracted relationship throughout the novel as he continues to seek her advice, given his administrative problems. Though divorced, the two can’t manage to stay apart for long. Interestingly, however, sexual relationships play only a minor part in the story.
In the end, Gladwell makes a comic mess of his attempt to take over the English department’s offices in Willard Hall and Fitger puts the SOV situation to bed by finding a way to deal with Cassovan’s unmarked SOV ballot. The solution simply lands in his lap. Overall, the narrative includes plenty of hijinks as the students keep dressing the campus statue of Cyril Payne, the institution’s original benefactor, in comedic garb and the school newspaper does its best to stir up campus tensions. The Shakespeare Requirement story leads to campus posters or headlines in the press: “Shakespeare a Payne in the Neck at Midwestern University,” or “KILL WILL” (alternatively “SAVE WILL”).
While “The Shakespeare Requirement” is worth a few leisure hours this winter, it is far from irrelevant when one thinks about current developments at Trent University and other Canadian institutions. Having faced chronic underfunding since its inception, Trent has made changes in recent years that have led to a loss of funding for the core humanities and a related erosion of the curriculum of many of its founding departments. English, history and philosophy, for example, have shrunk in size and relative importance, while new and better-funded programs like nursing, forensics and business have flourished. It’s where the money is, and it seems to be what today’s students want — programs that lead to immediate employment.
But what happens to the development of the basic university-level skills when the liberal arts, upon which Trent was founded in the early 1960s and thrived for decades, become unfashionable and are seen, increasingly, as less important than job training? How will Trent students continue to excel in writing skills, close analytical reading and basic knowledge about Canadian history, literature and culture? I fear that these new students will know very little about how Canada came to be and how our culture has developed. Neither will they have the necessary skills to communicate clearly on their own if “the teaching of literature and composition” become of secondary significance.